The Great White Slump Is Everyone's Slump

Four of five adults in the United States "struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives," a finding that admittedly captures a wide net of hardships but those hardships are facts of American life.

Most Popular

The AP story spends a fair amount of space on the issue of white suburban and exurban poverty, as if to say "economic hardship, it's not just for minorities anymore." But, without diminishing the real human toll of racism (past, present and Florida) it's time to face that when it comes to poverty, class has long trumped race.

To put it another way, people are racists, but the economy doesn't really care. America's big companies that make for all those high profile stock billionaires just want the cheapest possible productive labor and they will go to the ends of the Earth to get it, skipping over rural Appalachia and Detroit alike, without sentiment.

Says AP: "'Poverty is no longer an issue of 'them', it's an issue of 'us',' says Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who calculated the numbers. 'Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.'"

Rank is talking about the wrong "them" and "us." "Them" are the tiny elite that runs the big companies, trade associations, think tanks and three branches of government. The "us," is everybody else, of all colors, which even taken together cannot afford to buy the attention from the ruling class, much less consideration in terms of policy.